Option- Filed, received parking cone in mail stenciled with "It is not yours, it is TheIRS." Included were politely worded instructions on parking cone application with or without use of personal lubricant.

Most use data directly from the Federal form, so if you (or your Federal tax preparer) is using software to do the job the state gets done automatically with the federal form.

The bitch in Ohio is city tax forms. The problem is that most people live and work in different cities. The work city taxes are automatically withheld, but the resident city isn't. And resident cities have complex rules regarding how much credit they'll give you for a work city. More importantly for the computer-savvy-types on Slashdot, many cities have completely different tax laws but very similar names. Bedford and Bedford Heights use the same ZIP code, which confuses computers who decide which city you're in based on postal code. There's a City of Oakwood and two Villages of Oakwood, all of which charge income tax. None of these municipalities uses the same form (Oakwood City and Bedford proper are independent, Bedford Heights and the Oakwood near Cleveland uses the RITA form, the one in Paulding uses CCA).

Local control is nice, but it is diametrically opposed to the goal of easy paperwork.

The poll titled In the 2012 U.S. presidential election [slashdot.org] had 29% votes for "I am not a US voter", and the latest Thanksgiving activity poll [slashdot.org] had 46% voting for "Having a mostly uneventful and ordinary day", so it wouldn't surprise me if ~30-40% of people who regularly vote on/. aren't US citizens.

Screw you and the horse you rode in on. Everytime the US goes to war, we get dragged in beside them due to the ANZUS treaty, which by the way also provides leverage t allow the RAIA to influence our copyright laws and the US health industry to lobby against our PBS scheme to provide subsidised pharmaceuticals. Let's not start on the various import tariffs we face importing products to your protected markets as an ally.

"This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane."With that being said, I'm one of the now-33% not paying taxes to the US. Yet. Until they invade my country. Which would be welcome, as a matter of fact.

Some of them could be Americans who question why they should be paying taxes. There do seem to be a few of those about.

There..fixed that for you.

We've been calling ourselves that for most of the time since our inception, and until recently, was commonly used in most parts of the world.

We're entirely comfortable with keeping with this time honored, traditional manner of referring to us here in the USA, so, don't feel you have to go along with this recent attempt to try to change the common name we're know

As I've asked before of the "USian"-using trolls: do you refer to citizens of the Republic of India as "ROIans" instead of "Indians"? Because the Republic of India isn't the only country on the Indian subcontinent. Do you refer to citizens of the UK as "UKians" or "Britons"? Ireland is part of the British Isles but not part of the UK, after all.

Australians are quite happy to be called Aussies. New Zealanders are generally happy to be called Kiwis but seem to get upset for some reason if you call them Sheep-fuckers. Maybe you can explain what I'm doing wrong there.

In many cases they might also have a word carrying the same ambiguity as the English 'American': e.g. "The Real Academia Española discourages the use of americano or americana for U.S. citizen, and recommends the use of estadounidense". So I suppose it depends which word is in general use as to which you'd normally hear.

My point was that I don't believe 'USian' or similar is genuinely meant to cause offence most of the time. Occasionally, certainly - but I don't think that should be the default assumption. I've used it from time to time myself and have no intent to cause offence (hell, half my family are from the US, including my wife, I have no reason to denigrate them).

If you're talking about Romney's "47%" comment, he didn't say that 47% didn't pay income tax. He said the "47%" got back more from the goverment than they paid. Significant difference.

If I recall correctly, the 47% number was based on a poll result that had 47% saying they would vote for Obama. Romney jumped to the conclusion that this same 47% of the voters got more back from the government than they paid. There is probably a strong correlation but I somehow doubt that the correlation is one to one. T

There are probably a lot of people in the 47% who know they don't get back what they pay to the government but are still happy getting back whatever they can and expected that to be higher under Obama than under Romney.

It sounds like you are implying that government benefits are the only or main reason that people voted for Obama.

I'd put forth that many of the moves by the current administration do see to steer more and more of the US population to become dependent upon govt subsidies, entitlements, and welfare programs. Look at the increase numbers on the Food Stamp rolls last few years...that alone is somewhat of a telling number.

Actually that is a trend observed around the world and it's true that many partially blame the US government for it but it's their lack of financial oversight coupled with the greed of bankers and the lack of regulations stopping the local idiots investing in those unsafe and unregulated US markets which is the cause. One of the reasons Canada escaped a lot of the financial harm was because of strict rules governing how much Canadian banks could invest in the US.

I'd put forth that many of the moves by the current administration do see to steer more and more of the US population to become dependent upon govt subsidies, entitlements, and welfare programs.

. Look at the increase numbers on the Food Stamp rolls last few years...that alone is somewhat of a telling number.

You'd have a stronger argument if the rich states hadn't overwhelmingly supported Obama, and the poor states hadn't opposed him.

A tax-the-hell-out-of-California-and-use-the-cash-to-bribe Mississippi strategy is not working when MS hates you.

What's actually going on is simple. city folks demand more of their government, which means they vote for the tax-and-spend party. They think taxing-and-spending is the entire point of the government, so they're perfectly willing to pay high taxes.

OTOH rural folks don't depend on the government, they don't believe the government is trustworthy, thus if you tell them "Obamacare will save you thousands" they probably won't believe you. And if they do believe you they'll vote against you anyway because saving people money is not the government's job.

Romney: There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. And he'll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that's what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what it looks like.

We can leave it as an exercise for readers to determine how "significant" the difference is. Actual video clip [motherjones.com] can be seen here in case someone doesn't believe the transcript.

If you don't define payroll taxes as "taxes" then you won't mind increasing the payroll taxes by eliminating the cap, which would solve our (supposed) problems with Medicare and Social Security shortfalls.

As Abraham Lincoln said, if you define a tail as a leg, how many legs does

There are several that I wouldn't mind living in, like you said some of the Caribbean islands, there are a couple of small European nations that wouldn't be too bad such as Andorra and Monaco. Ideally I suppose one would get a citizenship from a low/no taxation country such as Saint Kitts then move to a country that has no (or low) taxation for non-citizens but still lets them live in the country without much hassle.

The biggest problem with international "shopping" is comparing quality of life per dolla

Heh, even better, a lot of tax software refuses to accept NRA or the dummy SSN, but doesn't tell you until the end of the process. We've filled out tax returns like that in the past using software then couldn't submit them until we corrected the 'error'...

I have given my info to the accountant, but the paperwork is not prepared yet. I am expecting a refund, though. Of course this means I am not claiming enough exemptions even though I currently claim 13. As far as I am concerned I want to get to the end of the year owing Uncle Sam the maximum amount possible short of having to pay penalties for underwithholding.
It certainly is admirable though that the government has managed to brainwash people into thinking that they are getting some kind of bonus when the

Many people getting money back from taxes are getting *more* money than they paid in due to "refundable" credits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit. They *do* get some kind of "bonus" in that case. However the ~50% of us who fall into the "eeeeeeevil rich guy" category are the ones giving Uncle Sam an interest-free loan for 15 months, or paying a 3% APR penalty if we do not let them get enough principal for that interest-free loan.

FYI, did my return and owe money. And some of that 3% APR penalty as well.

Never understood the complaint about them holding the money for a few months free of interest -- you people must have better banks than I do, because mine offers some slim fraction of a percent on savings accounts; if I had the money for the same length of time, the amount of interest it would earn me would perhaps buy a medium-sized sandwich.

Well, there is also inflation. If you use the governments figures, then you are giving them $100 which belongs to you and then 15 months to 16 months later they hand you back $95 or so. Of course, inflation is actually much higher than 3%, so it is more like you give them $100 and then 15 months later they give you back $85.

Never understood the complaint about them holding the money for a few months free of interest -- you people must have better banks than I do, because mine offers some slim fraction of a percent on savings accounts; if I had the money for the same length of time, the amount of interest it would earn me would perhaps buy a medium-sized sandwich.

You could invest that money in arenas that generate more return, or even use it to build more wealth by building a business. The fact that the gov't has eliminated that possibility is reason enough to complain, let alone the fact that they do prevent you from accruing even minimal interest on it.

I would love for them to scrap the current code and implement a billing system. Yes I acknowledge that it isn't that realistic, but just because most folks cannot manage their personal income does not mean all of

There was a time, many years ago, when I filed my own taxes, on paper, using a pencil and a hand calculator. I knew what every number was and how the calculations were done.

It kept getting more and more complicated and time consuming, until about 10 years ago I finally gave up. Now I plug the numbers into a program and it prints out the forms--correctly, for all I know. Even with a program, it is hugely complex.

The tax code has to be complex so that there will be places to hide the loopholes for rich people. I don't make enough money to benefit from the loopholes, but I make enough that I have to deal with the complexity. Every year by the time I'm done with it I'm spitting nails.

I would go one step further voting day should be the day taxes are due. Although given how many people believe that a tax refund is free money from the government instead of the government returning excess money it took from you I doubt either would help much.

I'd like to see a REAL flat tax. National parks, roads, FAA, EPA, OSHA - they all protect us, rich and poor, about equally. So take the US Federal spending ($3.8 trillion) and divide it by every legal resident (about 300 million) and there you go. Everybody gets a bill for just shy of $13,000.

Sure. I'm sure somebody that makes federal minimum wage, and pulls in $13,624 a year, if they manage to get enough hours to work 40 hours a week for every single week of the year, will find that completely and totally fair.

You're right, certainly. But I don't think hitting people with a tax bill that amounts to over 95% of their yearly income is necessarily the right way to go about that.

Especially when you know damned well that you're only talking federal, and the state government is going to pull a hell of a lot more than the remaining $600 in taxes, too. You're effectively asking for the poor to accept an effective tax rate of well over 100%.

That's also assuming that your claim of all federal services protecting the rich

The complexity isn't a deliberate attempt to hide loopholes. The complexity is a result of competition between the group that wants to make taxes more fair and the group that wants to exploit loopholes.

The politicians in group A add reasonable exceptions, which is good and all, but does make the tax code more complex. Then the accountants in group B go through the entire tax code and find any loopholes and start using them. Then the politicians in group A say "but that's not what we intended!" and try to

I got annoyed by a number of things (1) increasing cost, (2) overly long interview worksheets, and (3) frequent begging popup ads. So I basic went to "smart forms" (Federal Free Fillable File Forms) which do the arithmetic for you. I just fill the the necessary lines and that is all. Arithmetic used to be my greatest enemy in the pre-computer days.

Yep! Agreed, and I'm not even one of the people who started out doing my taxes with a pen, paper and calculator. (Well, I may have for my very first return on a 1040EZ form, actually. Can't recall anymore?) But I have used software like TurboTax for many years now, and even with it, it's disturbing how complicated a return has become.

I think I actually see more special interest "perks" crammed into exemptions on the state returns though? You can get some ridiculously niche and specific tax breaks in there

You do realize that pretty much everything costs twice what it did 20 years ago without being much better? It's called inflation.

As for civilization building, I suspect that Sergey Brin chose not to build google in a super-low-tax African state because he did not want to be kidnaped, and not being kidnapped requires police, who are paid with tax money.

What joke response? I'm not a US citizen so won't be paying US taxes (in that way... I'm sure the good people in US government get me in some way).

BTW in a country with a huge national debt, I'm amazed at how little tax the US citizens pay. I was in Atlanta once for work, the locals there told me that they expected to pay about 7%. Goodness me...

The locals gave you the right answer, but to the wrong question..
The average Federal Tax is around 7%..
Then there is social security...(roughly 6.5% on average).. also please don't argue you get this money back... you don't... its been misappropriated.
Then State taxes( mine is 7%)...
Then local taxes (mine is 1%)..
Then sales taxes (variable depending on goods/spend)...
Property Tax (if you own property)
Bottom line.. when I look at ONLY the taxes I pay to one government entity or another it eclipses

I have lived and work in both the US and NZ earning about the same $ income. The tax you pay between the two is about the same - all up about 35%-40% of income by the time you add up all the sales taxes / income tax (country+State) / social security tax.

Parent is right. There's also one funny thing if you compare taxes in Finland, which most red-state Americans would call a "damn Communist country", with U.S. taxes. If you do the math on the statistics, the result is that both pay the same sum in PPP dollars. In Finland, the government does all sorts of things: healthcare (average for a developed country but efficient), education (world's best education system according to PISA), proper school lunches at no cost, free tuition at universities + a student be

I made less money in 2012 than 2011 but my tax bill went way up. We're totally screwed as a country and our children are doomed.

Seriously, "Government waste" has become axiomatic, rampant and inevitable, and their only solution to our massive debt is "raise taxes"? We are so doomed.

No one is responsible. No one can be brought to task for all that is bad, wasteful, stupid and useless in government. No one in government cares and no one outside of government has any power to change it.

(To those who will bleat "Vote!": I do vote but the only choices likely to be elected are those thoroughly venal politicians who will continue the irresponsible spending. It is built into the election process that those who are committed to significantly and actually cutting the government spending will never get the big donations necessary to win. The big donors give the big bucks to politicians who will turn the federal faucet in their direction -- not turn it off. )

Your objections to what I said are not clear. Are you saying that a 17 trillion dollar debt is perfectly fine? Are you saying that it's great that the the rate of increase is increasing? Are you saying that the debt we are passing onto our children is of absolutely no concern?

Why do you bring up what was happening in 1953 when the national debt was 275 billion dollars?

Do you truly think that government waste, pork, duplication, mismanagement, corruption and stupidity is OK?

It's not great, but it's not The End Of The World As We Know It. There are always spikes in the debt during major wars and economic crises. We had a higher debt-GDP ratio in World War 2 than we do now.

Are you saying that it's great that the the rate of increase is increasing?

First off, it's not. [washingtonpost.com] See Fig. 1-1: The deficit has been declining for the last few years. And while it is currently worse than anything since WW2, if you look at the 1980s you'll see that it's not *that* much worse.

Secondly, the reason for the current high deficits is high unemployment (fewer people paying taxes). In the short term (~5 years), we need more spending to make up the demand shortfall. Ideally that would have happened in 2009 with a ~$2T stimulus, but unfortunately we didn't get that. In the medium to long term, the deficit is dominated by Medicare and Medicaid costs. The Affordable Care Act will do a lot to lower those. Single-payer could probably do more, but unfortunately we didn't get that either.

Are you saying that the debt we are passing onto our children is of absolutely no concern?

It doesn't have to be, if we actually pay it off. Remember, we were running surpluses 15 years ago, and that didn't require massive budget cuts and the end of every safety net. The economy grows exponentially (for now, at least). Inflation is also exponential. The debt is an absolute dollar number, and does not grow on its own. (Bond rates have been dipping into the negative -- people are paying us to loan us money.) A moderate tax increase adds up (just as the Bush tax cuts have). And since taxes are super-duper-low right now, raising them (after the recession is over) is the easiest and least painful fix.

Why do you bring up what was happening in 1953 when the national debt was 275 billion dollars?

Which was 60% of GDP at the time. Absolute numbers are misleading. The U.S. has a staggeringly huge economy, so any number that's proportional to it will also be staggeringly huge. Sixty years of exponential growth adds up, so now we talk in trillions instead of billions. For comparison, the median household income at the time was under $5000 [census.gov].

You brought up a whole lot of extraneous and immaterial "facts" to argue with me. Nothing you said contradicted what I said. The government is out of control and all that's going to happen is more and more and more taxes.

The point of my response was that this is not, in fact, what is happening. It would take quite a lot of tax increases to get back to what has been normal for the last 60 years, and such tax increases would eliminate the deficit outright. Your statements about the government being "out of control" are vague by necessity, because you don't have trillions of dollars of actual "waste, pork, duplication, mismanagement, corruption, and stupidity" to point to. The spending that gets attention (like the stimulus and healthcare reform) are deficit-*reducing* measures.

(I'm still curious how you managed to get a huge tax increase, by the way.)

Our children are doomed -- but that's perfectly OK with you, just look at 1953 and ignore what's going on right now.

The only thing currently dooming "our children" is global warming. The debt probably isn't even in the top 10. This is good news. You should be happy about it.

To make my point perfectly clear: The problem isn't "taxes", the problem is DEBT. It's currently $53,112.68 for every man woman and child in the U.S. and it's going to get a lot worse.

If you want to see a spending cut-based approach to deficit reduction in a

My wife and I both work at least 40 hours a week; annually, we bring in about 70K gross. We both take zero exemptions, and both contribute at least an extra $20/mo to taxes. Own a house, no kids.

I couldn't tell you exactly what we paid in, but it was a fucking lot; still, this year we owe almost $1500 in taxes.

My sister-in-law hasn't worked in almost 4 years, was on welfare for 3 of them; her husband made about 40K gross last year. They don't own their home or cars, but do have 2 toddlers, and are preggers with a third.

They paid in maybe $4000, and will be receiving over $8000 back.

This tax system is seriously fucked up. I used to wonder why hard working (barely) middle class folks like myself get taxed to hell and back, and lazy teet-suckling POS' like my SiL get fucking paid to not work, but it finally dawned on me: It's casino economics.

See, if the government gave the wife and I double what we paid in, you know what we would do? Either sit on it, or use it to pay bills and fix our home. But the government (or rather, the people who run it) don't want that; they want us to go spendspendspendspend, and "boost the economy" by wasting money on shit we don't need.

My SiL, on the other hand, will take that $8000 and spend it like it's on fire, buying consumer electronics, jewelry, et. al. manner of shit.

In case anyone else was wondering, THAT is why the middle class gets shafted by the tax man, and welfare queens get paid to be welfare queens.

Who does my taxes is not the problem. The problem is, we make too much money/not enough money for people who own a home and don't have kids. Well, that and the fact that my tax person isn't willing to risk her career or livelihood by lying on a tax form. Uncle Sam is rather harsh on CPAs who get caught fudging numbers, and we don't have access to any Apple-like legal teams...

Honestly, what I "need" to do if I wanted a refund, would be "have children." Nothing lowers your tax burden like a $3500 Child Tax Cr

70K Gross and you're paying that much? Or do you mean 70K Gross each? I do feel your pain. My girlfriend got back about 9K a few years ago while I paid a few hundred dollars. She has three kids, we had essentially the same job. I support help for working families, and the child tax credit isn't all bad in my mind, but it does seem excessive sometimes.

A refund only means you've prepaid the goverment more than you ended up owing for taxes for the previous year. Neither you nor the GP post mentioned what you owed on your gross, but of course since you filled out taxes, you know that owe on your AGI (adjusted gross income) after finally taking off the personal and family exemptions. You, madame/monsieur Coward, do not understand that the refund reflects only the difference between what you've already paid vs. what you end up owing.

No, it's very easy to end up on the short side of withholding. If you are married and you and your spouse work, don't own a home, have no children, and didn't do something unusual like buy a Chevrolet Volt to get a whopper tax credit, you *will* be owing quite a bit in taxes. Two full-time, year-round incomes which are much above minimum wage and no extra deductions beyond the standard deduction will generally make you ineligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit and you will have to pay taxes. The IRS might

The refund is dependent on how accurate your witholdings were with regard to your final tax filings. It is not a measure of how much you paid in taxes. If you want to pay less on tax day, withhold more. If you're salaried you should be able to figure out how much taxes you will owe beforehand.

You do not give specific figures about your taxes and the breakdown of where they come from, so I'll run some estimates based on the info you did give. If you make around 70k household gross that would mean you're taxed at 15% federally for the majority of that income. Simplified and adding 5% for state taxes comes out to 14k. $1500 owed on tax day means you paid in about $12.5K in the year or just over $1000 a month.

I imagine you probably pay a bit more for property tax as well, although it's impossible to estimate that without knowing where you live. It could be a hundred bucks or it could be several thousand.

So really you're probably paying around 20% plus whatever for property taxes. That is not a ridiculous amount by any measure. You have a cognitive dissonance that 70K a year is an unremarkable middle class income (which it is, although closer to upper middle class than working class for sure) but somehow the taxes paid on that income are exorbitant. They are certainly not. That is a perfectly reasonable amount to pay.

You are also seriously deluded if you think someone with a 40K household income is a welfare queen. That's somewhere around the 40th percentile of incomes in the US, ie more or less perfectly average.

The elitism apparent in your post is disgusting, honestly. You badly need to get some perspective. 70k a year is not "barely" middle class anywhere outside of Malibu or Westchester County. If you're having trouble making ends meet at that income level it comes from your spending habits and sense of entitlement, not from Uncle Sam.

All tax returns are due April 15th, or the first non-holiday weekday after that unless you request an extension. If you have taxable income and a zero balance on your taxes, you're definitely living right, and should go out and buy a lottery ticket NOW! But even then, you wouldn't know that until after you did all the paperwork . ..

At the company level the last dollar I earned was taxed. It was taxed twice more when I spent on a candy bar. Once I paid (sales tax), the second the store paid (business tax). Then when they used it to buy more candy bars it was taxed again...

That's the reason I refuse to take arguments about double-taxation seriously. In the US you pay taxes every time money leaves one legal entity's control and enters the control of another legal entity. If shareholders are immune to lawsuits directed at their corporations they are (by definition) separate legal entities from said corporation, and therefore they pay income tax on dividends. Period. End of story. Stop whining or include the Nick-pays-no-taxes-on-candy bars clause in your goddamn proposal.

Hell in Ohio every time a dollar leaves on entity's control and enters another it's taxed at least three times. There's State Tax, the IRS, and municipal tax. Most of the times there's also a fourth Residence tax because nobody in the Cleveland area lives and works in the same city.

Trouble is, if you start trying to jack up the capitol gains taxes, you're going to hurt the common man too. Most of us in the middle class have our retirement investments in the market (401K's, IRA's and the like), and boosting up the taxes on that will hurt peoples' already injured retirement savings.

If you want to get at the rich money, you need to come up with a more imaginative way. If you had some sort of Fair or VAT tax (to replace income tax and investment taxes entirely), you'd catch the wealthy d

VAT or any other sales tax hits the poor far harder than the rich.Yes the rich buy more shit than the poor. But if you earn £10k a year chances are every penny of that is getting spent, and so getting taxed. If you earn £10 million a year how much are you realistically spending on stuff that will be VAT rated (In the UK basically all consumer goods excluding most food but not property)? £1 mil tops? Most likely far less.So you gain a pittance in extra tax from the richest and push those on

The comment you responded to wasn't about sales tax, it was about VAT. VAT is added at every step whereas sales tax is only when the end consumer purchases something. VAT hammers the poor more than a simple sales tax. But what really keeps the poor down is having to pay corporate income tax.

ALL taxes are regressive. Period. Trying to "soak the rich" is impossible, as tax avoidance games prove. You just target capital productivity and send it to the corner where it will just sit... protected. Meanwhile the jobs that capital used to fund goes away.

Case in point, they had a Luxury tax on Super boats (aka Yachts) for a very brief period during the eighties. When the rich stopped buying them, the jobs created by making them went away too. AND it didn't raise any money, it actually caused a decrease in revenue.

What people do not realize is, that taxing causes unexpected results, and those results do no affect the rich nearly as much as the some would like. But they always affect those that cannot avoid them or are harmed by tangential results, like those described above.

If today's mega-rich aristocracy have such an unbreakable hold over society that it seems *impossible* to tax them, then perhaps it's time to re-introduce the style of taxes excised by the French in 1789-99 on the heads of the aristocracy by means of guillotine.

I'm not overly familiar with US financial stuff, but isn't the entire point of an IRA/401k is that they aren't subject to capital gains tax?

Yes, taxes on tax-deferred accounts like IRAs, 401k, 403b, etc. are -- well -- deferred until the funds are withdrawn, usually after retirement. [sotto voce] Substantial penalties apply for early withdrawl. Information not guaranteed to be accurate.[/sotto voce]

Problem is that earning $98k in some countries isn't like earning $98k in the US...

My wife and I live in Australia - she is an American citizen and thus has to file her US tax return every year, despite not having stepped foot in the country in years and having no income there. $98k is a comfortable but by no means excessive income here (the average income in Australia is somewhere in the 60-70k range). Most people in IT and other white collar industries will be making that much by the time they are aged 35-40, if not earlier.

Compounding this is the huge fall in the value of the US Dollar in the last few years (thanks to the Fed printing like crazy), to the extent that the Australian Dollar is now worth more than the US Dollar and has remained there for several years. This makes very easy for an American in Australia to overshoot the foreign income exemption in the US Tax Code, after conversion to US Dollars - just normal middle class expat families.

Australia is by no means alone here either - wages have stagnated in the US to the extent that wages in quite a few countries are significantly higher. Now I agree that anyone earning a higher amount (by whatever means) should be paying more tax; no issues there. The problem is that it doesn't account for the higher cost of living in those countries. Earning $98k in Australia might look good on paper, but the cost of living is twice what it is in the US too, so you end up double-taxing people that really aren't making a ridiculous amount of money (in terms of purchasing power). The fact that they don't even live in America (and thus aren't getting anything FOR those taxes) is just rubbing salt into the wound.